


Champagne and Cucumbers

by nimblermortal



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Gen, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 07:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15724644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: Someone wipes Jace's memories, and he finds himself in a sewer.The city is not a good place for a synesthetic telepath who can't tell which thoughts are his own.





	Champagne and Cucumbers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kupopopoyo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kupopopoyo/gifts).



The whole place reeks of sewage.

The boy blinks, slowly, and looks around him, the cloud of other sensations finally overwhelmed. It doesn’t just reek of sewage; it is sewage, covered in it. He’s in a sewer, and he smells human excrement and tastes champagne.

Champagne, and fainter notes of other flavors, none of them as strong as sewage or champagne, but he thinks if he put his mind to it he could figure out those other flavors, a sommelier divining just how the wine was brewed. He thinks he has forgotten how, and this strikes him as odd because he’s not very old.

He’s here because there was a feast of flavors. Too many; he couldn’t sift them apart anymore. He lost track, until the sewage cleared his palate. His head.

His head. The flavors are thoughts. Champagne tastes like his own thoughts. There is a memory, the first touch of alcohol in his mouth and his surprise as he realized it tastes like his own thoughts. It is too inconsequential a memory to have been taken from him. Someone has taken his memories.

His thoughts taste like champagne, and his name is Jace.

His hand, Jace’s hand, is trailing against the sewer wall, sticky. His clothes, everywhere, are disgusting. Revolting. They smell of sewage. But there are no people down here, and so he catches only the traces of their thoughts above him, and he can taste the light fizziness of his own mind without them overwhelming him. They did, not long ago; he can understand that now. He can try to sift through it, trembling as he remembers coming into being in a city, the worst possible place, his mouth exploding with sensation and the champagne bubbles crushed and bursting under the onslaught.

There was a name, a sense he ought to follow it - Emmara Tandris. Ovitzia.

There’s a sense that Ovitzia is deeper in the city.

He starts moving, then, one hand on the sewer wall to guide him. When he finds a ladder, he takes each step haltingly, reaching up until he feels just enough to touch them as they go by one by one. Chocolate cookies. Overripe strawberries. Underdone steak. Raw egg.

They give him a map of the city, and a dizzying sense of the complexity of this world he does not understand, that has no hint of familiarity to it, that is nevertheless intuitive because its obviousness is apparent in all the minds he’s near. None of them are familiar with the sewer, but they don’t have to be; Jace can map the twists of the sewer against the pattern of the streets above, and if he stumbles, any ladder will provide him with a map.

It’s still nightfall when he finds himself near the city wall. He likes the night, because the minds around him stay contained within their walls, for the most part. Dreams taste like honey water and are easy to ignore. By the gate, his mouth fills with dull cheese and broccoli.

“Where are you going, young man?” the gate guard asks.

“Out,” says Jace. “The Simic Combine.”

“Running away from home, are we?”

“Are you going to stop me?”

_He reeks,_ thinks the broccoli. Jace has been trying to ignore it.

“We’ve got enough street kids to worry about. But you’ll die out there,” says the guard.

“All right,” says Jace. He’ll die faster in here. He walks through the gate.

 

The wilderness tastes of nothing but champagne. It’s exhilarating at first, after the overstimulation of the city. Then Jace realizes he’s hungry.

He’s not used to being hungry. That’s interesting. He decides he must have been fairly rich, wherever he came from. A lot of the flavored minds closest to the sewer were hungry. Rich people, full people, don’t live near sewers.

He’s used to eating whatever is put in front of him, because none of it tastes as strongly as the people who put it there. He’s used to meals that taste of nutmeg and grits and feel like any number of things in his mouth. He’s used to barely noticing the taste of champagne, but it’s the only flavor in his mouth now.

He has no idea how to survive in the wilderness, so he keeps walking, vaguely in the direction the guard seemed to think would take him to the Simic Combine. He doesn’t know what the Simic Combine is, any more than he knows whether he’s walking the right way or if any of these plants are edible. He drinks water when he finds it. His hands tremble as he scoops it from the stream.

On the second day, an animal runs up to him. Its eyes go blue and it falls over dead. Jace has no idea whether this is normal for animals here, but he found a knife in his belt on the first day, so he cuts away a square of the animal’s skin and eats its flesh raw, hoping it’s not toxic. It’s a new flavor, and as with every new flavor, it makes a few unnamed sensations in his mind click into place, named now. Raw… whatever this animal is. He doesn’t have anything to carry it in, so he wraps a hunk of flesh in its own skin and goes on.

Most of the sewage has flaked off by the time he reaches the Simic Combine, but he knows that he is a haggard, scratched young man in tattered clothing, covered in dried slime and blood and carrying meat in a patch of ragged, bloody fur that is beginning to smell off as well. He’s still glad to see the Combine, to taste hazelnut in the revulsion that greets him from its guard. He was really hoping not to have to eat any more of that meat.

“Who are you?” asks the person who tastes of hazelnut, though he can tell she wanted to ask _what_.

“My name is Jace,” he says. “I want to live here.” He’s not sure that’s true anymore. He can feel the space beyond them, and it’s just as crowded as the rest. But he doesn’t want to go back to the wilderness and eat rotting meat, either.

“What were you doing in the wilderness?” asks the other guard, who Jace had been ignoring because she tastes of something he has no word for and does not particularly enjoy; but she asks the next questions as well, questions like _why are you covered in blood_ and _why didn’t you get yourself cleaned_ and _how did you kill the ceratok._ Jace answers tiredly and falls asleep half way through. He thinks that’s when they leave him be, and he wakes up to a bowl of porridge that, even when he’s alone, tastes like nothing.

The questions continue after that from a man who tastes like sand, but he asks them less fiercely as well. Jace thinks he might be winning. He pushes for winning. _I need to live somewhere away from people,_ he tries to explain. They give him a job feeding the experiments. They expect him to be frightened.

But they feed him and let him sleep and keep him away from people, and none of the experiments is as bizarre as an enormous plated creature that runs up to him and falls over dead, so Jace is… happy. When people come to visit, he answers their questions about the creatures. He knows all the answers; they taste like cucumber.

He likes the cucumber thoughts; they’re an easy, comfortable background to his own, unobtrusive, and they taste good with champagne. They’re omnipresent in his new life, and he starts to think of them as his own. He feels guilty about it at first, but they are always there, and he is still new to this; perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed that his thoughts don’t always taste the same. Part of him knows that this is a justification, but most of him is lonely.

After a while people start noticing that he knows all the answers. People come to him, tasting of new leaves and sour grass - his champagne thoughts call it sour grass; his cucumber thoughts call it sorrel - and ask him how he learned.

“I look after the animals,” Jace says, “it makes sense,” but that doesn’t explain how he described gene splicing to a young visitor last week.

They pull it out of him eventually, because they have all the time in the world to do so, and he does not have the protection of being born here. When he admits it, when he explains that he can pull the thoughts out of their heads, they leave abruptly, and he is alone, and the walls taste of stainless steel. He does not know how long they will leave him here.

They do not leave him for long. He tastes cucumber and cashews, coming toward him down the hall, and he raises his head, wipes the frightened tears off his face, and is watching the door when they enter the room, a guard and a girl his age. It is her mind that tastes of cucumber, and he feels foolish that he didn’t realize earlier that she was a girl.

“I haven’t done anything wrong!” she protests, and he realizes she’s there to test him.

“She doesn’t have to be here for this,” he says. “I can do it without her here.” But the door does not open.

“Do what?” she asks, so Jace explains, and she says, “You’ve been _cheating_ off me?”

“Well, how do you know so much about it?” Jace asks, because he is tired, and frustrated, and everything he knows about this world he has taken from someone else’s head until he no longer knows how someone else might learn it. And she explains about books, and studying, and the sparking moment that is realizing the connection between two things, and he has not the slightest idea what she is talking about.

They talk for a long time, trying to understand each other, and Jace finds himself saying “I don’t know” far more often than he is used to. The answers are always there for him - unless people ask him about himself. He doesn’t have a childhood. He doesn’t have experiences to draw from.

When they try the door, it’s unlocked; so they walk away, back to the experiment pens, and the animals come running when Jace sticks his hands through the bars, and he teaches the cucumber girl to stroke them, and she tells him how every one was made. He can taste the words before she says them, but he hadn’t known what a joy it is to hear them spoken.

He sits in her study and is a foil for her, mirroring the things she tells him in new language, letting her set him straight, and watching her bright blue eyes light up when his fumbling leads her to some new discovery that he only half follows even with her thoughts to guide him. When she thinks of something new, her eyes almost seem to glow.

She tells him when there is going to be a meteor shower, and they sneak out into the wilderness, far enough from the Combine that the lights fade and the stars come out. It’s cold in the grass, and he knows that she is also refusing to say anything about it because she does not want to go. Not until they’ve seen at least one meteor to justify the trip.

“You know why they want us to keep talking?” she asks suddenly.

“You’ve guessed,” he says, which is as much as to say that he knows.

“They want to weaponize you,” she says, because she knows he loves to hear things said out loud. He loves to talk; his voice sounds nothing like champagne, and hers sounds nothing like cucumbers. “They want to know, if you can her our thoughts, what else you can do.”

“Weaponize _me_?” he asks as if it were a surprise. “I can’t control it. I can’t even tell what thoughts are mine, half the time.”

This is news to her. He hears her hand rustle in the grass.

“In a crowd, I lose myself completely,” he admits, and he knows she’ll tell her master, their masters. “That’s the first thing I remember. That’s why I came here; I thought the Simic Combine would have open spaces.”

“There are no open spaces in the world,” she says, in the middle of the only park for a hundred miles. They squint at the stars that only they can see, and hope for one to shoot across the sky.

“I’ve never heard of anyone like you,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anyone who can teach you how not to lose yourself.”

“Neither does anyone else,” he says, because it’s the one thing he’s searched through in the mind of every scholar he has met; but none of them has even thought of what he can do, much less ascribed it to anyone else.

“In another world,” she says slowly, “there might have been someone. Someone who could tell you how to build walls around your own mind.”

He has thought of this, too. He has tried to go there, and only found sore eyelids from pushing his eyes shut for too long. Her hand has crept across the field and found his, and he squeezes it once.

“I don’t live in that world,” he says. “I live in this one. Tell them I am trying to learn how the animals think.”

“Is it true?”

“It is,” he says. He cannot taste their minds, not even if he strives, but he can watch how they react to new things and guess at what their thoughts would taste like if he could. It makes him a good keeper. There is a monkey-child who reminds him of the autistic blackberry girl who hangs around the cages and listens every time he tells her a fact from the cucumber girl’s mind, and parrots them to her parents when they come to pick her up.

“Do you think you can?” asks the cucumber girl, who is holding his hand as the first meteor darts between the trees above their heads.

The blackberry girl’s parents have invited him to supper next week. Her father tastes of peaches and her mother of ice cream, and the child she carries doesn’t taste of anything at all yet. Those are tastes he can balance and still have a conversation where he shares his own views. They’re hungry to be parents, and he wouldn’t mind having a mother to make proud of him.

“I think I could spend a lifetime studying it,” he says. There isn’t anything he wants more.

**Author's Note:**

> I apparently wrote this for Kupo two years ago and forgot about it completely until today. I have almost no memories whatsoever of writing it, and know almost nothing about Magic, but here are some notes left over from the bottom of the story, in case you wanted an epilogue:
> 
> The cucumber girl’s - or the blackberry girl’s? - parents adopt him and tell him they’re proud of him. He adopts random people around him. He gets older. He doesn’t have children. He names the animals. He’s happy, and things are easy. He gets restless sometimes and goes walking, but the questions he gets, tinged in various flavors, are enough to chase him back to the experiments. He gets caught up in the debates sometimes, and that’s enough to sate his intelligence. He’s still a prodigy, just an - undriven one. A contented one.
> 
> If I ever knew who the cucumber girl was, I don't anymore.


End file.
